LUNAR EXPLORATION CONCLUDED

A Geologist for Apollo 17

As was his custom, Slayton waited until Apollo 15 had returned from its
flight to announce his choice of crewmen for the last lunar mission. On
August 13, 1971, he named Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Jack Schmitt
as the prime crew for Apollo 17, backed up by Dave Scott, Al Worden, and
Jim Irwin, just returned from Apollo 15.55 The decision to put Schmitt on the crew
instead of Joe Engle - who had trained as lunar module pilot with Cernan
and Evans on the backup crew for Apollo 14 - was, like all those before
it, Slayton's, and no one in the NASA organization put pressure on him
to make it.* He noted later,
however, that "we might have gotten some [pressure], I suppose, if
we hadn't made the right decision down here. [But] there wasn't any
doubt . . . that we were going to have to do that when they canceled
[Apollo 15 and 19] , and we did it."56

Engle, who had been out of town during Apollo 15 on personal business,
learned that his plans had been changed on August 10, when he called in
to the Astronaut Office to see if he had any messages. It was a
tremendous disappointment; he had made the hard decision to leave the
X-15 program in 1966 because he thought that going to the moon was the
only way he could surpass his past accomplishments. But, he said,
"when something like this happens, you can do one of two things.
You can lay on the bed and cry about it . . . , or you can get behind
the mission and make it the best in the world." Engle's choice was
to support the mission. He would try to help Schmitt fit into the crew
that he himself had trained with for so long. After that, he hoped to
test-fly the space shuttle.57

At the customary news conference the week after the announcement, the
first question challenged Schmitt's assignment to the crew instead of
Engle. Schmitt said, "There's no question that Joe Engle is one of
the most outstandingly qualified test pilots in the business," but
he was confident of his own abilities: "as far as my qualifications
to fly the spacecraft are concerned, I will attempt to compete with
anybody in the program." Cernan agreed: "Jack isn't sitting
here as part of this crew for any other reason than that he has rowed
hard, he's earned it, and he deserved it." He noted that Engle and
Dick Gordon (command module pilot on Apollo 12) had been assigned to the
new space shuttle project and commented (perhaps with a trace of envy),
"Those guys moving into shuttle right now are probably going to
contribute . . . a lot more than maybe even we can contribute by a lunar
mission."58

On its final flight to explore the moon, then, Apollo would send a
scientist - the one astronaut indisputably qualified to make the
observations scientists had long wanted to make. It remained to be seen
whether, under the constraints that limited lunar exploration, he could
apply his experience to enhance the quality of the results.

* But see Chapter 12. Earlier in
the year, Dale Myers, chief of manned space flight, and Robert Gilruth,
MSC director, had agreed to Schmitt's appointment to the Apollo 17 crew,
subject to his satisfactory completion of training, and Slayton was
undoubtedly a party to that decision. The decision was evidently a well
kept secret, however, for as late as August 3, Schmitt was quoted as
admitting that it seemed unlikely he would get the chance to explore the
moon. Stuart Auerbach, "Apollo 15 Leaves Moon Orbit At End of
Historic Mission," Washington Post, Aug. 5, 1971.